The Taipei District Court ruled against former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), Taiwan People’s Party Chairman and presidential candidate, in a defamation case against US author Ethan Gutmann, with a decision yesterday to turn down Ko’s request for prosecution, in the controversy over Ko’s past visits to China for teaching medical transplant techniques that have allegedly played a role in forced organ harvesting.
It is the third time Ko lost a legal proceeding against Gutmann, who wrote the book The Slaughter in 2014 as an expose of the “mass killings, organ harvesting and China’s secret solution to its dissident problem,” for which Ko denied having a role, and had dissociated himself when the subject came up.
In the first round, Taipei prosecutors in August 2020 decided to drop the charges and not proceed on the defamation case brought by Ko, who sued Gutmann for calling him a liar during a news conference in 2018. When he was asked: “Do you think that Dr Ko is a liar?” Gutmann nodded and said: “Yes.”
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
Ko appealed that decision, requesting prosecution on defamation, which the Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office turned down again, then Ko filed at the Taipei District Court for a “private prosecution,” a criminal proceeding initiated by an individual or a private organization, instead of a public prosecutor.
After completing its probe, the Taipei District Court yesterday said in a statement that public prosecutors had examined the available evidence and presented the investigation results, which found no contravention to the rules of experience and logic, therefore ruled to reject the request, while confirming it is the final decision on the case, with no further appeal permitted.
In the court’s filing, the judges said that prosecutors had carefully reviewed and examined on the disputed points presented by Ko, and found insufficient evidence to prosecute Gutmann on the defamation case.
The judges also cited an earlier correspondence between Ko and Gutmann in 2013, before publication of The Slaughter, regarding whether any correction is needed on Ko’s statements during interviews, which Ko responded in e-mail: “The story seems OK.”
Regarding the “liar” comment, the judges said that it was during a news conference in Taipei in October 2018, and Gutmann was passively giving a response to a question from the audience without any intention to insult Ko.
In the initial case filed by Ko for defamation, Taiwanese political pundit Brian Wu (吳祥輝) was also accused, as Wu arranged Gutmann’s 2018 visit to publicize The Slaughter, which alleged that Ko had helped Chinese medical authorities on techniques and equipment for harvesting organs from Falun Gong members, Uighurs, political dissidents and inmates.
In his book, Gutmann alleged that “Ko was an intermediary” for Taiwanese seeking to receive organ transplants in China, and that Ko, having taught extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) techniques to doctors in China, created a “perverse incentive” for Chinese doctors to harvest live organs.
After the book’s publication, then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) and other party figures presented accounts and evidence to indicate that prior to 2014, Ko had visited China 18 times, with 16 trips from 2003 to 2008 and two more in 2013, and said that he was mostly invited to present seminars and allegedly teaching on use of ECMO for harvesting organs.
KMT members also alleged that Ko had profited from representing medical firms in China for sales of ECMO devices.
In a follow-up interview in 2020 regarding the issue, Gutmann said: “The organ harvesting tragedy was created by Beijing, but it has been assisted by a handful of foreign doctors who thought they could ride the Chinese dragon and come back home as if everything was normal. As I have made clear in my previous statements in Taipei and Westminster, some Taiwanese doctors were not immune to these temptations.”
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